# Rethinking the politics of form: The strange case of the political novel

## TL;DR

This paper explores the concept of the political novel and questions whether it can be considered a distinct literary genre.

## Contribution

The paper challenges the idea of a separate genre for political novels by examining form and content.

## Key findings

- The political novel is often defined by theme rather than form.
- The genre's diversity in appearance raises questions about its classification.
- The debate highlights the tension between genre as an institution and its potential for change.

## Abstract

The genre is an institution like a church or a university, a particular way of grouping literary works on the basis of their external and internal form, according to René Wellek and Austin Warren. But institutions are also there to be changed, and frameworks and rules can be challenged. As Fredric Jameson once observed, while literary criticism cannot do without genre, modern literary production continually and systematically undermines the concept itself. While political ideas and the political milieu dominate the political novel, according to Irving Howe, the literary form remains intact. Wellek and Warren therefore rightly question whether it is even possible to speak of a distinct genre when the grouping (of novels) is based solely on the theme and not on the form itself. The fact that Robert Boyers, one of the few authors to have dealt with the political novel in depth, ultimately abandoned the idea of a separate literary genre shows that Wellek and Warren’s observations have hit the core of the problem. So the question arises: are there other aspects besides content that make a novel political? Why does the political novel appear in so many different guises (such as utopia, dystopia, spy novel, war novel, thesis novel, proletarian novel, partisan novel, etc.)? Is this the cause of the problem, or is it simply the law of the novel as an unfinished genre in Bakhtin’s sense?